Sauntering Vaguely Downward

Popular historians and non-fiction writers are partial to the concept of sudden social collapse, which they have used to explain the “disappearance” of such past civilizations as Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Classical-era Mayans, the Ancestral Puebloans, and even the Roman Empire. Many of us like the drama of rapid change, the pathos of social decline, and the ease of finding a moral lesson - beware of war, don’t mistreat the environment, obey your leaders - in a tale of decline and fall. Archaeologist Guy Middleton has recently reminded us that life and death, especially the life and death of an entire human society, are rarely so simple. Elements of a civilization can and do decline over time, but cultures can endure for centuries. Confusing the fall of a single powerful city or the overthrow of a small elite with the death of a whole civilization distorts the lived experience of most of that society’s people, and encourages us to adopt an elitist view of history.

Middleton’s particular specialty is the Mycenaean civilization, which ostensibly fell apart at the end of the Bronze Age. Middleton argues that much of Mycenaean culture (e.g. pottery, religious beliefs) survived the abandonment of its palace complexes in 1200 BCE, and finds little evidence of the kind of violence or resource exhaustion that might have caused a sudden collapse. The Mycenaeans instead abandoned a particular kind of political system, replacing the centralized palaces with smaller and more diffuse settlements, and their old semi-divine kings with the basileis of the early Hellenic era. What ended in 1200 was a polity, not a society. His description reminded me of the fate of the Ancestral Puebloans, whose Pueblo Indian descendants overthrew their priestly elite (ca. 1300 CE), stopped building large stone towns on the elite’s behalf, and moved into smaller but more numerous agricultural towns in the more fertile Rio Grande valley. In each case there was a period of political disruption and social change, but only the old elite and their latter-day sympathizers would see this as devolution.           

Calakmul, Classic-period Mayan city

The Mayans and Easter Islanders provide additional examples of the evolution-not-devolution model of cultural change. Fiction writers and television programs have generated much popular interest in the question “What happened to Mayan civilization?” Middleton's answer is both simple and surprising: it survived in one form or another until the Spanish destroyed the last city-state in 1697. States rose and fell in the Classical period (750-1050 CE), and drought or intra-elite violence led to the abandonment of some urban centers, but the post-Classical Mayans continued to build cities, write books, and engage in maritime trade well into the early modern period. Middleton has little patience for those who charge the Mayans with destroying themselves, and even less for writers like Jared Diamond who castigate the people of Rapa Nui for wrecking their environment and becoming a pack of starving, deracinated wretches. Historical evidence shows that indigenous Easter Islanders instead lived fairly rich and decent lives, maintaining a stable population and a sizable agricultural surplus well into the nineteenth century. The toppling of the island’s distinctive statues, or moai, occurred not in one spasmodic bout of desperate violence, but in a smaller series of conflicts over the course of 200 years. As with the Mayans, the destruction of Rapa Nui’s people came from outside forces, in particular the arrival of Euro-American slavers in the 1860s.   

Middleton’s insight can even be applied to the largest and most dramatic episode of civilizational collapse in historical literature, namely the fall of Rome. There is a good reason that the most famous historian of this process, Edward Gibbon, took 2,700 pages and fourteen years to chronicle “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:” Rome’s so-called collapse took nearly 1300 years from start to finish, a period spanning twenty human lifetimes and exceeding by a millennium the institutional lifespan of the United States. The Eastern Empire, home to the imperial capital and most of the old empire’s wealthy urban centers, did not end until midway through the Renaissance, while in the West a soi-disant Roman Empire held on until Napoleon’s time. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Roman civilization did not so much fall as saunter vaguely downward. Indeed, the Roman language and ecclesiastical bureaucracy (in the form of the Catholic Church) remain with us today. Slow change and cultural persistence make for a less exciting story than the sturm und drang of socio-political collapse, but they more accurately characterize the lives of far more people, rich and poor, famous and obscure, than war and ruination.  

(My thanks to John Barnes for linking to Middleton's fascinating article.)             

Crescent City Burndown

French New Orleans, born a rough riverside outpost in 1718, died on Good Friday seven decades later. The settlement had come under Spanish administration in 1769, and the local paymaster, Vicente Nunez, had in honor of the holiday lit altar candles in his home. While Nunez went off to have dinner, the candles ignited his ceiling, and high winds spread the flames from roof to roof. By late afternoon New Orleans lay in ashes. Eighty percent of the inhabitants’ houses had burned down. The hospital and Ursuline convent survived the fire, but most public buildings did not. It had been a mournful day indeed.

French Quarter, Sept. 2013. Photo by author.

The colonists, free and enslaved, rebuilt the town, which occupied too important a location for abandonment. Where possible they rebuilt in brick and stone, in conformity to a new urban fire code. When feasible they rebuilt in the Spanish Baroque style: buildings now featured distinctive iron-railed balconies and interior courtyards, after the fashion of other contemporary Spanish administrative centers. New Orleans now more resembled Havana or Santiago than Montreal.      

New Orleans’s 1788 fire also initiated the community’s Americanization, or rather its integration into the economy of the United States. The port had suffered from supply problems throughout the 1780s, and the conflagration destroyed nearly all of the warehouses. Governor Esteban Miro ordered flour from Philadelphia, and American territorial governor Arthur St. Clair offered to ship food downriver from the Ohio country. While Spain’s minister plenipotentiary politely declined St. Clair’s offer (he claimed that Spanish merchants had already “glutted up the [provisions] market”), in subsequent years Miro allowed at least some riverine shipping into New Orleans. Spanish regulations barred American farmers from using the Mississippi River, but the Orleannais’s need for cheap food and timber remained too great. By the turn of the century New Orleans retained a French name but was full of Spanish architecture, American goods, and a large African-descended population. It is always easier to think of cities as monocultural, but much of the Crescent City’s unique identify comes instead from its contingent, disaster-ridden history and the blending of cultures that resulted.

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Sources: Primary inspiration comes from this short narrative by Cindy Ermus. See also her article “Reduced to Ashes: The Good Friday Fire in Spanish Colonial New Orleans,” Louisiana History 54 (Summer 2013): 292-331; Arthur St. Clair to Diego Gardoqui, 16 July 1788, in W.H. Smith, Arthur St Clair Papers (Clarke and Co., 1882), 2: 59-60 (quote); David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (Yale UP, 1992), 207; Kevin Barksdale, “The New Orleans Fire of 1788 and the Transformation of Iberian-American Relations in the West,” paper presented at the 77th Meeting of the Southern Historical Association, Baltimore, 30 Oct. 2011.

A Great Love of Desolate Places

Lena Pillars, via Wikimedia Commons

During our stuffy and enervated time in lockdown, I have enjoyed making virtual trips to the chilly vastnesses of Siberia and northern Canada. A few days ago I took a “road trip” up the Mackenzie Highway from Alberta’s northern border to the southern shore of Great Slave Lake, gateway to the high Canadian Arctic. I’ve also discovered the Ultima Thule blog, whose author provided travelogues of (inter alia) a virtual excursion down the Lena River, from the Baikal Mountains, past the frigid city of Yakutsk, to the Arctic Ocean. My desire to travel into the subarctic I have probably inherited from my mother, who found names like “Yellowknife” and descriptions of such remote places as the vast Lena Delta peculiarly evocative. (She was also a fan of Glenn Gould, who wrote about this boreal longing in his documentary “The Idea of North.”) I suspect that if I tried to make such a journey in person I would be devoured by mosquitoes or mauled by musk oxen, so I will leave the Great North to hardier tourists and enjoy its austere beauties from afar.